Virgin Mobile’s Beyond Talk plans

This is going to be my next cell phone plan. I’ve been mostly happy with my plain-Jane Net 10 service but I’ve been growing increasingly frustrated by Net 10’s lack of a bona fide smart phone. With my crazy schedule it would be nice to have an easy way to keep my calendar with me. Also, as I travel more with my job it becomes more important that I have a WiFi and 3G-enabled phone to keep me occupied in the airports.

Virgin Mobile’s $40-a-month plan for unlimited network and 1200 minutes a month will fit me just fine. With the LG Optimus V phone that runs Android, I’ll have all I need.

* 3G Nationwide Coverage You Can Count On

* All Taxes & Fees Included, except those charged at the point of purchase

* Pay with Credit, Debit or PayPal for worry free monthly service

* Buy Top-Up cards to pay with cash

via Cell Phone Plans – Pay As You Go and Prepaid | Virgin Mobile.

ISS fades over Raleigh

I took this photo tonight of the International Space Station as it flew over Raleigh shortly after sunset. As the space station headed northeast it passed into Earth’s shadow, making it grow noticeably darker until it was almost completely invisible. It was pretty amazing to watch it fade out as it passed halfway through the sky.

The next, potentially spectacular pass is Sunday around 6:40 PM. Right now the weather forecast calls for partly-cloudy skies but we may get lucky with another good view.

Using DSLRs for video

Canon consultant Patrick Reese demonstrates shooting video with a Canon EOS 7D

I went to a conference last weekend that was being video recorded. Instead of the typical DV cameras I’ve come to expect, though, the videographers were moving around the room with DSLRs. Curious that they were doing this with what I thought were still cameras, I went up to ask about their equipment.

It turns out the higher-end DSLRs (also known as HDSLRs) from Canon and Nikon are now being widely used to shoot high-quality HD video, often to the chagrin of more traditional HD camera manufacturers. A DSLR’s relatively small size and its ability to make use of exceptionally high-quality lenses makes it ideal for shooting HD.
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Cheap thoughts: cell phones in prison

I’ve read about the problem of cell phones in prison for the past year or so and I’m not sure why this is such a difficult problem to solve. If prison officials don’t want prisoners to access the outside world, and the FCC won’t let them set up jammers, why not do the next best thing? Why not set up a small, low-power cell site in the prison itself, and lock it down?

Any phones inside the prison will automatically register themselves with the bogus cell site because the local site will have a stronger signal inside the prison. Then the prohibited cell phones could be easily identified, flagging them for later confiscation. Also, the repeater site could either monitor any transmissions from the prisoner’s phones, or block those transmissions completely. All of this would be playing by the FCC’s rules and the cost would be less than $10,000 per prison.

Why hasn’t anyone tried this yet?

Update 1:27 PM: Looks like several states are implementing the “managed access” solution I’ve suggested. (Thanks, Guus!)

Satellite delight

I saw an ad on Craigslist a few weeks ago for some Free to Air satellite receivers that were being sold. The price was right and I’ve long been interested in seeing what I could pick up freely and legally from the skies, so I bought the receivers and later went back for some bigger dishes.

I had the day off Friday, so I set it all up, tuning in Galaxy 19 at 97°W, which is a satellite that carries a few hundred mostly-international channels. After some brief fiddling with the aim of the dish I was watching Al Jazeera straight from space. It was actually the moment I first heard that Hosni Mubarak had resigned.

This is really cool stuff, though there isn’t much in English worth viewing on this particular satellite. I plan to set up other dishes to pull in other, more interesting satellites, but for now I’ve proven that it works. In time I should be enjoying all types of radio and television beamed freely from space.

AOL Mail is hopelessly FUBAR

You've got stupid!

I swear, the folks running AOL Mail couldn’t find their asses with both hands and a flashlight.

First, they lose their customers’ email in a huge crash, taking until yesterday to restore the email archives of users. Then in the middle of this disaster, they mistakenly flag my mailserver on their spam list. Only one anti-spam list (Barracuda Network’s) out of a dozen showed my server as blacklisted, but that was enough to kick me off of many services, as I said before. Barracuda immediately cleared my server but AOL continued to show it as a spam source. When I learned that a friend’s mailserver had also been mistakenly blacklisted, I grew more concerned.
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Free Pool of IPv4 Address Space Depleted

The Internet’s growth reached a major milestone today when its original IP address space, IPv4, assigned the last of its free addresses. That means the Internet’s growth will now depend on the new IP addresses, IPv6.

IPv4 provided for a mere 4 billion (or 4,000,000,000) addresses. The new IPv6 provides for 340 undecillion (or 3,400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) addresses. Hopefully that will last us for a while!

The Number Resource Organization NRO announced today that the free pool of available IPv4 addresses is now fully depleted. On Monday, January 31, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority IANA allocated two blocks of IPv4 address space to APNIC, the Regional Internet Registry RIR for the Asia Pacific region, which triggered a global policy to allocate the remaining IANA pool equally between the five RIRs. Today IANA allocated those blocks. This means that there are no longer any IPv4 addresses available for allocation from the IANA to the five RIRs.

via Free Pool of IPv4 Address Space Depleted | The Number Resource Organization.

Fully open-source video streaming

I found the missing link today for my open-source video streaming project: Xuggle. The Xuggle project includes a version of ffmpeg which can RTMP-stream to the red5 server.

Well, sorta. The red5 server needs to be patched in order to work with Xuggle, An exception occurs otherwise. You grab the patch from here and patch the RTMPProtocolDecoder.java file.

Here’s the command line I use to get Xuggle’s ffmpeg to stream my USB webcam from Linux:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/xuggler/lib /usr/local/xuggler/bin/ffmpeg -f video4linux2 -s 320×240 -r 15 -i /dev/video0 -f oss -ac 2 -i /dev/dsp1 -f flv rtmp://eddy.neusemedia.com/oflaDemo/streamname

Normally I would use ALSA to grab audio from the USB microphone but Xuggle’s ffmpeg binary wasn’t compiled with ALSA support. Fortunately, the OSS driver works fine.

Here’s the command I use to stream from my ieee1394 (also known as Firewire) video camera:

dvgrab – | LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/xuggler/lib /usr/local/xuggler/bin/ffmpeg -f dv -i – -s 320×240 -r 15 -f flv -ar 22050 rtmp://eddy.neusemedia.com/oflaDemo/streamname

This takes audio from the DV camera, but if I wanted to take audio from the USB microphone (or the built-in microphone) I could put in a line like the first one.

The quality is absolutely outstanding! Even on my slow cable modem connection I can push 320×240 15fps video with 22KHz stereo audio to my server. On a beefier Internet connection (like the city’s network at the community center) I could dial it up to even higher quality.

So there you go. Other than the codec (which is not free “as in speech”), all the parts are free. The only cost is the hosting bandwidth. One thing I’d like to find is a good way to take this RTMP stream and push it out a high-quality video card for ingesting into the city’s cable access channel, if need be. That would turn this in to a great solution for the city’s RTN network to offer live coverage of city events. I’m also interested in an RTMFP solution so that the client plugins can share the bandwith, rather than having my server hammered when many people try to watch at once.

Now I know a lot of non-geeks are interested in getting their own streaming television, so I’ll get to work on writing up a howto with minimal jargon.

Free media streaming, solved!

On a happier note, tonight I figured out the last piece of the puzzle of my free media streaming project! I have paired the red5 Flash media server with Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder to create stunning live video, all ad-free. The total cost of my software: $0. It’s just what I’ve been looking for.

I began by downloading and compiling the red5 software on my hosted CentOS server. This involved running a few “yum” commands to install the necessary Java dependencies but that was little challenge. Then I walked away from the project for a bit and when I returned I could not remember how to start red5. After a few more Googles, I discovered red5 had to be started from the /usr/lib/red5 directory on my server.
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Cutting the cable

A friend of mine, fed up with the high cost, just canceled his cable television service after another friend showed him how he could watch his shows on the Internet or through streaming services like Netflix. Another friend got a Netflix-streaming Blu-Ray player for Christmas and is considering doing the same. They both will likely save a bunch of money.

Netflix reported yesterday that they’ve reached the 20 million subscriber mark. They have a $10 billion market value: more than some Hollywood studios. Netflix’s stock jumped over $16 to close just shy of $200 a share on the news.

As I’ve been saying many times, cable television is going through a sea change in how it does business. If cable doesn’t offer a-la-carte programming, people (formerly known as “consumers”) will get it through Netflix or through other Internet sources.